Thursday, September 11, 2008

When rechecking our blog,I feel like talking a little bit about how I feel about our short-term trip in the United States, which here also can be summarized as the proverb Mike taught me before , ‘When in America, do what Americans do’, coming from the old, famous saying, ‘ when in Rome, do as the Romans do’. In my opinion, our American life experience can be detailed as four main parts, campus life, food, tourism and friendship. So here we go. We’ve visited two great universities, Ohio State University, which we stayed a little longer, and the University of Tennessee. Both of them get beautiful campus. And personally, I like OSU's better. Between the two universities, we traveled along passing quite a few states and big cities, like Idiana, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Ohio and Tennessee of course. We had tasted all kinds of typical American food, and American-Chinese food, too. NY and DC are our last two destinations. They’re fantastic! Wherever we went, we met new guys made friends with them and had a lot of fun. I think the true meaning of cultural exchange is to find out the biggest differences and make yourself get involved, which here equally means “when you’re in America, do what Americans do”. In this way, we need curiosity, openness and the little but necessary courage to talk to people. And sometimes we may even need to change ourselves a little bit to adapt the new environment. This is actually what we did in the US and we’ve learned pretty a lot. Moreover， I am impressed by Matt Dixon’s words after our cute discussion about poems. He wrote that, I came away with the perception that people all around the world are the same in many aspects. I think we are all inherently good people, and we all like to have fun. Even with the language barrier we could communicate and express our genuine like for each other. I think if societies had more interaction we would see that we all have more in common than we think. You know what, I feel almostly the same way! All in all, I want to tell all you guys that this is a wonderful trip and thanks to it, we become a big family; thanks to it, our future won’t be the same! And I want to express my sincerely gratitude to OSU, University of Tennessee, and Wuhan University, additionally to those people, both American and Chinese, who's been working so hard on this program to provide us this once-in-life opportunity to check out what America is really about! Thank you all! Miss you all!

Starting in mid July, 46 brave travelers from Wuhan University in Wuhan, China will be hosted by team members at The Ohio State University for a culture, travel, and language Summer Study Program. This blog will let our friends in China and the United States keep up with the group, and share in the learning and fun!